The current reputation of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles depicts the team as a fun-loving group of crime-fighting teens who love pizza and quippy one-liners, but their origin is way darker than most fans know. In the original comic, the Turtles were depicted as being dark, gritty, and true assassins as their ‘ninja’ title would suggest.
In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, the Turtles are introduced to fans in an immediate example of violent action. The team is fighting a group of street thugs, brutally incapacitating them before returning to their underground lair in the sewers of New York City, where their leader, Master Splinter is waiting for them. Splinter, a not-so-cuddly mutated rat, tells the Turtles of his origin and why he raised and trained the Turtles in the art of Ninjutsu. Splinter explains that the Turtles have one true mission, and that was to exact Splinter’s revenge on Shredder because of the villain’s previous crimes against Splinter’s former master.
Essentially, Splinter raised his very own hit squad for the sole purpose of killing Shredder due to a personal vendetta. Once Splinter tells them their mission, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles carry it out to brutal perfection. The Turtles attack Shredder, stabbing and slicing him on top of a building on the New York skyline, then they throw him off the roof and he lands to his death. After killing Shredder, the Turtles immediately establish themselves not as a group of vigilantes, but a kill squad that was successful in their very first assassination.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were originally assassins, which is a far cry from how they are depicted today. The biggest difference is the individualization of the Turtles that exists now that didn’t when they were introduced. While the original comic was printed in black and white, some colored covers for the series showed that all of their masks were red and not the multicolored ones fans are now familiar with. Plus, their personalities were all more severe and basically identical to each others’.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were hardened killers with no distinguishing factors to identify each of them other than their weapons of choice. Today, each Turtle has their own mask color, personality, and interest as it relates to the team. Leonardo is the empathetic leader, Donatello is the tech genius, Michelangelo is the classic teenage personality, with Raphael maintaining the hardcore persona and the red mask once shared by them all. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ origin is way darker than most fans know as they were depicted as straight-up assassins and not the now-established kid-friendly group of vigilantes that fans know and love today.